arcanicanis

Really it was just the Palm Pre’s hardware that held it back

I'd argue it was just purely the rat race of "the most apps" where all other vendors lost out to iOS and Android. It didn't matter that it had all the essential applications, as well as having plenty of the fads/gimmicks of the time (Angry Birds, Pandora, et al) natively supported, it still boiled down to the normie logic of "BUT I WANNA RUN ALL THE APPS!" There was also the whole culture sentiment of "if you make a niche Android/iOS app and sell it, you could become like a millionaire overnight" that people seemed to clamor around, as another gimmick economy (as The Next Big Thing(TM) after the dot-com bubble).

There was also the tidbit that most of the operating system (outside of Linux kernel and standard utils) was proprietary. It's only when it was pretty much given up on, that they started to open it up as various open source projects. Comparatively Android was far more open source than webOS at the time.

and further, it feels like Matrix just progressively becomes more of a mess, like piling on more infrastructure on top existing infrastructure, to sidestep some performance issues.

Essentially "Hey, let's pile on ANOTHER PostgreSQL database, on top of your existing Synapse installation, to hold state information for your client, so it's so much faster to sync up your rooms when you log into a new fresh client!"

Whereas, 9 years into the existence of a protocol, and the lead developer has to present at a developer conference as a 'groundbreaking change' that you can login and see your conversation history within a couple seconds finally: https://youtu.be/eUPJ9zFV5IE?t=601

Yep, it's similarly of why I've lost enthusiasm of Matrix, especially with my prior focus on XMPP over a decade prior. It was originally marketed as if Matrix was going to have full account portability, and I believe even be able to pop onto chats on remote servers if even your homeserver is down; but instead all we got was just another flashy webchat with a RESTful API and Double Ratchet support that federates. The reference client is a boat anchor of resources, compared to something like Conversations/Gajim in XMPP world. There's the reference server in Python, which has a Rust rewrite, while the focus of Dendrite was retconned to "ehh, this is more intended for embedded use, not really a full Synapse rewrite"; meanwhile there's an ecosystem of several highly-performant XMPP independent server implementations.

I jumped onto Matrix back in the days when it was the Vector.im client (before Riot rebranding, and then Element rebranding) and had rode that for some years, but instead I'm back exclusively to XMPP.